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I think the hurdle from a programming language to actually creating mac-like software was too great for Borland and for casual programmers. MS-DOS became where

I think the hurdle from a programming language to actually creating mac-like software was too great for Borland and for casual programmers. MS-DOS became where you could write and share ugly but useful programs. Hypercard changed that but it was too little too late and Apple didn't have its heart in supporting casual programming. Professional devs don't realize what a big deal Visual Basic was.

bunderbunder 2y ago
Professional devs at the time certainly did. Some thoroughly eye-watering percentage of business applications were written in VB. I'm still not sure that any modern tech has replaced the sheer "it doesn't need to be beautiful it just needs to be functional and inexpensive to build and maintain" power that we had with tools like Visual Basic. Nowadays I'm accustomed to multi-person teams needing months to build what a single skilled VB6 developer could bodge together in a couple weeks, but I still sometimes marvel at how we got from there to here without enterprise and B2B development shops calling foul along the way. Perhaps it's because they know they can cover any increase in development cost with the larger amount of money they can squeeze out of customers using modern SaaS subscription pricing schemes.